The idea of outsiders tagging a museum’s collection really caught my eye in this week’s reading. Incorporating tagging on collection website is very useful not only for visitors to the website but to the staff at the museum. It forces them to look outside the conventional terms used in a museum setting. From personal experience, trying to find particular masks on a museum’s collections page is not easy to do because the terms can be so specific.
The museum software PastPerfect allows you to add keywords to make items in collection more searchable because they sometimes have a very limited list of descriptive terms. When creating the website for the photographs I would like to add objects to the page to show what the women were bringing back with them. If I had to use only the terms provided in PastPerfect, I am not sure that people would easily find some of the items easily. If visitors could also tag the items then it may help. The downside to this though is the worry that people will write paragraphs instead of keywords or use keywords that do not fit or inappropriate so it would need to be closely monitored.
I also really liked the Visual Velcro reading. Audio tours are useful when visiting a museum in another country. They open up the museum experience allowing tourists to get the most of their visit. When I visited the Louvre in Paris it would have been almost impossible for me to really see the Museum without the use of an audio tour as I do not speak French. Using audio tours to guide the eye around a painting is much more useful than a label. They are distracting and do not really help the untrained eye to really appreciate a piece of art. Videos showing the curator’s comments and the artist’s thoughts would be extremely useful as well. It would be helpful to know what the artist was feeling or thinking when they were creating a masterpiece.
